Conjuring a reason to celebrate the Fourth of July
by Mick Rhodes | editor@claremont-courier.com
The night Barack Obama was elected president, November 4, 2008, I sat around the TV with my two young daughters, 6 and 2, and shed a tear as the Obamas walked onstage at Grant Park in Chicago.
The young, vibrant president elect gave his victory speech amid chants of “Yes we can!” from the crowd of more than 240,000, many of them weeping. It wasn’t lost on me that Malia, 10, and Natasha, 7, were not too far off in age from my own daughters.
There was a new feeling in the air that night, a sense of joyous, confident optimism. It was a great time to be an American. It seemed we had turned a corner, that we were moving closer to realizing the promise of our young country’s audacious, though flawed, founding principles.
I cried again as I researched this column, watching the clips of the Obamas making their maiden voyage as the first family elect.
All that optimism seems impossibly naive now.
The first comment below the video of Obama’s November 4, 2008 victory speech on YouTube is, “Dear Americans: How did you get from here to now?”
I wonder the same.
Where did all that hope go?
The Fourth of July has always been a joyful holiday around here. We’ve paraded, barbequed, partied, and oohed and aahed at fireworks for as long as I can remember, which is quite a while.
But it’s really difficult to conjure up the enthusiasm this year, even with all the 250th anniversary hype. The reasons are numerous, and honestly I’m tired of thinking about them, let alone writing about them. Anyone who’s paying attention knows what I’m talking about.
When I travel overseas, folks tell me they see the U.S. as nation at war with itself in a tawdry, ultra-partisan death match. I can’t disagree. Our politics are sick and getting sicker by the day, and hope is hard to come by.
Outside of the mainstream media echo chamber though, good things are happening.
Young progressives are winning races in New York and elsewhere. Young people are growing more and more disillusioned with the corporate leadership of both parties. Young Democrats see the yawning blind spots in their party’s platform, with Israel and AIPAC, and with housing, healthcare, food, and fuel costs, and other worsening affordability issues. Their disillusionment has become a major driver of new energy in the party, even if the dinosaurs are resistant to the inevitable asteroid.
That youthful vitality is good for Democrats, because as the so-called “opposition party,” its leaders have been largely ineffective and even compliant. Trump’s Republican Party has rolled them, and their response has mostly been limp and unimaginative.
Amid this distinctly American chaos, with new outrage Y replacing old outrage X every 24 hours or so, we’re now being told it’s time to celebrate.
And I just can’t buy it.
I’m not proud to be an American right now. I’m embarrassed. And it feels awful to admit that.
Our 250-year-old democratic experiment is teetering on the verge of failure, and the crux of the problem, we’re told, lies in the war among Republicans and Democrats.
I’m not buying that either.
The real war is not political at all, but economic.
Lay Republicans and Democrats are being played. We’re fighting over scraps from the billionaire class table and squabbling among ourselves about left vs. right, while the real battle is happening in the up vs. down.
The billionaire owned corporate media feeds us 24/7 outrage, and we serfs go on squabbling anew. Meanwhile, the billionaires — and trillionaire — gobble up more and more wealth while we’re distracted by shiny objects and left struggling to pay for groceries.
Trump’s “big beautiful bill” cut $1.1 trillion from Medicaid, SNAP, and the Affordable Care Act and will eventually leave more than 15 million Americans without health insurance. No matter, the richest of the rich will receive a $1 trillion tax savings windfall.
And for those very few at the top of this wildly out of balance economic pyramid scheme, war is the ultimate profit center. Both parties rake in donations from corporations that profit from keeping us in a state of constant war, and as long as their shareholders are happy, war is what’s on the menu, indefinitely.
These dynamics were in place long before Trump first won the presidency in 2016. On his way out the door in 1961, President Eisenhower warned Americans about the rise of the military industrial complex. Successive administrations have had great domestic and international accomplishments — Johnson’s civil rights reforms, various Middle East peace initiatives (since violated many times over), etc. — and all the while power in the U.S. has continued to consolidate in fewer and fewer hands. This slide accelerated in 2010 with Citizens United, was supersized by Trump V1, and has now been fully realized by Trump V2.
Poor folks, transgender high school athletes, and especially immigrants do not harm the U.S.’s standing abroad or threaten our future prosperity, but they sure do keep us workers distracted, fighting one another while the ghouls in Washington appease their corporate, special interest, and ideological overlords.
It’s a lot to digest and still find the will to celebrate our birthday.
I wish I could turn it all off, salute the flag, and party like in days of yore, but I can’t. And so many people feel the same way. It just feels wrong to celebrate this version of America.
So maybe we celebrate what we aspire to be. In 1988 George H.W. Bush of all people said he longed for “a kinder and gentler nation.” We were far from that even then, but we can hope our better angels will prevail in the coming years and get us pointed in that general direction, right?
Maybe we can find something to celebrate after all, an imagined future with less white nationalism and more diversity, less income inequality and more equity, and less fear and more inclusion.
That sounds a lot like hope to me.
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Mick’s editorial in the most recent Courier spoke to everything I am feeling on this July 4th weekend. I am not sure I have enough time left to wait for those Better Angels. My husband and I take our signs up to Indian Hill and Foothill every Wednesday and Friday to protest what is happening to our country. We are in our 90s and there doesn’t seem to be too much else we can do. But thank you Mick for putting it into words.
Dawn Sharp, Claremont